Remembering those we have Lost: Elizabeth Bartlett

WWII Women’s Land Army Veteran Elizabeth Bartlett passed away on 15 April due to coronavirus. She was 99 years old.

Elizabeth was just 21 years old when she gave up her job in a Sheffield steelworks in October 1941 to join the war effort. She was one of 80,000 women who signed up for the home-based force to take farming and industrial jobs to help the war effort, and was sent to work on a farm in Kent. On her first day, she fell into a threshing machine and sustained a devastating injury that resulted in the loss of her right leg.

“I had worked on the machine in the morning but when I went to stand on it in the afternoon, someone had moved a board and I fell into it. My leg went into the machine,” recalled Elizabeth in a previous issue of Blesma Magazine.

“I didn’t have too much pain then; that all came later on. I remember going to hospital in an open-backed farm van and being taken straight in for an operation. I also remember coming out of the anaesthetic and being told off by the matron for making too much noise. I shut up after that! From then on, no-one contacted me, there was no interest in me, but I just go on with life.”

Elizabeth’s boyfriend of the time visited her in hospital just as he was about to deploy to the front line with his regiment. He was killed in action a few weeks later, which left Elizabeth having to deal with heartbreak, come to terms with limb loss, and get to grips with using a rudimentary prosthetic leg – all at the same time.

In time, Elizabeth began to focus on her recovery, and once she learned how to walk again, she re-joined the Women’s Land Army (WLA). In more recent times Blesma petitioned to win Elizabeth a war pension and, after a 75-year wait, she was eventually granted compensation, although even then it was only backdated five years – to the time Blesma took up her case.

“Elizabeth was very stoic and got on with life without a shred of bitterness,” said her previous Support Officer, Bill Gillett.

“She served her country in the Land Army and, although she never complained, she deserved compensation. Elizabeth didn’t feel any hostility to the authorities, which was amazing considering how harshly she was treated. If she had been hit by a doodlebug, she would have received a full war pension. I don’t see the difference as she was serving her country, and the WLA was recognised as a military organisation.”

After the war, Elizabeth went on to marry Peter, a horticultural expert, and worked in gardens and orchards as she and her husband brought up their two children, Richard and Anne.